Grand Old Party

Sorry, America: Mitt Romney Is Not Here to Save You

Romney may be a starched-shirt G.O.P. elder hailing from the time when politics were a little more civil, but don’t be fooled: he’s not going to assuage the concerns of Democrats and #NeverTrump Republicans.

Mitt Romney leaves the stage following a keynote address at the Utah County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner in Provo, Utah, February 16, 2018.

By Kim Raff/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Newly-minted Utah Senate candidate Mitt Romney accepted Donald Trump’s endorsement on Monday, and boy was it met with some disappointment. “That Mitt Romney wants—or would accept—the endorsement of Donald Trump disgusts me,” lamented Seth Abramson, one of those liberal “THREAD:” guys you might follow on Twitter. You hear that, Mitt? A fella on the Internet is disgusted with you.

Abramson, and others on #Resistance Twitter who vented about Romney taking the endorsement, appear to be ailing from one of the more delusional side-effects the Trump era: a misguided hope on the left that a handful of Republican white knights in Congress might stand up to Trump and save America from the apocalypse. John McCain.Jeff Flake.Bob Corker.Lindsey Graham.Susan Collins.Ben Sasse. Now Romney. All of them were #NeverTrump Republicans during the presidential campaign. And all of them have been willing to condemn Trump’s vulgarity, lack of discipline, attacks on the press, and pernicious habit of giving white people the benefit of the doubt over Americans with a darker skin tone. Corker might have landed the sharpest jab of all last October when he called the White House “an adult day-care center.” It needn’t be said who’s wearing the diaper.

Their reasons for speaking out might not be totally pure: Corker and Flake both realized they couldn’t win re-election because their MAGA badges weren’t red enough. But their willingness to chide Trump’s outlandishness—Flake compared Trump to Josef Stalin on the floor of the United States Senate—felt like a welcome defense of our norms and institutions. Their words stood out in sharp relief against the rest of the fall-in-line G.O.P. universe, addicted to the crack pipe of a Republican base that honors Trump with an 86 percent approval rating.

Those Republican senators stepping up to criticize Trump have been such a refreshing deviation from today’s G.O.P. standard that they’ve even been welcomed on the left as fellow travelers. Romney, too, has found himself in this category. He’s a starched-shirt G.O.P. elder hailing from a long ago time—those halcyon days of 2012!—when politics were a little more civil and the scandals were about dumb media-generated gaffes like “binders full of women,” not women accusing the president of sexual assault.

Romney lost that campaign narrowly—he got the silver, in Mitt-speak—and like many former politicians, he became less polarizing in political exile, partly owing to his surprisingly humble performance in Mitt, the Netflix documentary about his ill-fated campaign. During the 2016 campaign, despite refusing to actually campaign for any of Trump’s opponents, he gave a big speech calling Trump a “phony” and a “fraud.” Romney has since been willing to speak up from the sidelines when the president did sinister things like defending the white-nationalist marchers in Charlottesville. The response from Democrats: Come back, Mitt! We miss you!

That’s how much Trump has scrambled the universe. We are now living in a world where Democrats, activists, and woke pseudo-journalists who graduated from Oberlin in 2014 rush to celebrate “reasonable” Republicans who might break the Trump fever. Even George W. Bush—who ignored warnings about Osama bin Laden, misled the country into war, enshrined torture as an interrogation tactic, instituted a privacy-shattering surveillance state, cut taxes for the rich, exploded the deficit, and helped ruin the economy—is now somehow remembered fondly on the left these days. At least he’s not Trump! LOL! Romney became subject to the same kind of revisionism. But this elite fantasy that Romney was going to gallop to the front lines of the Republican civil war, bravely straddling Rafalca, to lead a showdown with Trump? It was bound to end in disappointment.

The primary reason for this is obvious: he’s Mitt Romney. He tried to run to the left of Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts in 1994, then ran again in 2002, winning the governorship as a non-ideological fix-it guy. Cut to 2007, and Romney is all of a sudden pretending to be the most conservative varmint-hunting Republican in a presidential field that includes Mike Huckabee. He ran again in 2012, coddling birther-theorist Donald Trump during the G.O.P. primary. He lost, even though Karl Rove pretended he didn’t. Then, after attacking Trump during the 2016 race, Romney consulted with Trump about becoming his secretary of state. Trump passed. And now Romney is running as Mr. Utah the Utah Man. Ha ha ha. Terrific. Thanks, you guys.

In other words, Romney is a politician. He will do whatever it takes to win, including taking Trump’s endorsement. Even in Mormon-dominated Utah, where Trump was never as popular among Republicans as in other states, Romney has to win at least a plurality of Republican voters in his Senate primary. And then win a majority of them in the general election. There’s no pragmatic political reason for him to get into an ongoing flame war with the president of the United States over who supports who. Romney’s staff—a mixed bag of #NeverTrumpers and Trump accommodators—opted to get the question out of the way early, even though Romney will constantly be questioned about whether he supports or disavows the latest tweet that Trump belches into the world.

But here’s the other reason progressives should stop being disappointed in Romney: he’s a Republican. Flake, Corker, McCain, Graham, Collins and Sasse are all Republicans. Stop pretending they are something else. If you’re going to hate-tweet at Romney, or blast Flake for voting for tax cuts, don’t fall in love with them in the first place. Flake should be allowed to speak out against Trump’s aberrant behavior while also voting for his tax cuts. He’s a conservative, and his party has the majority. Same for McCain, who should be allowed to condemn Trump’s flattery of Vladimir Putin while also—hold on to your seats—voting for tax cuts. He, too, is a conservative. The same goes for Graham, who is fighting to save DACA despite golfing with him on the weekends.

All of these senators could probably do more to check Trump—investigating whether Trump’s family is profiting off his presidency, or holding hearings on the murky killings of four Green Beret soldiers in Niger last year—but on big-ticket policy items, expect them to vote like Republicans. Approximately none of them will vote against Trump most of the time. If they did, they’d be Democrats.

Romney should also be given some credit for chastising Trump when he deserves it. Too few Republicans are inclined to do so. But if he wins, I’ll bet you $10,000 that he’s going to vote for more tax cuts, entitlement reform, or whatever the Chamber of Commerce has on its agenda for 2019. He might even throw us a curveball. Maybe he’ll break with his party on guns. Or immigration. Or something else. He’ll certainly be a competent leader with a workmanlike attention-to-detail. But Romney is not a Democrat. He’ll be a junior Republican senator—more junior than Little Marco!—so his ability to grab media attention with his national profile will be his primary leverage. Language—the big speech, the rare interview, the finely sculpted tweet—will be his biggest weapon against Trump. Be O.K. with him wielding it every now and then, should he choose to. But try to keep your “THREAD:” to yourself when the Republican senator from Utah doesn’t put on a pussy hat and vote aye on Medicare-for-All.